Kerr will sack you, woman told Gough

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Gough Whitlam's former adviser on women's affairs, Elizabeth
Reid, warned him the governor-general, Sir John Kerr, was planning
to remove him as prime minister at least six weeks before the
controversial dismissal took place.

And she believes he might have taken the warning more seriously
had she been a man.

Her account challenges conventional wisdom on how and when
events unfolded. Mr Whitlam has alway maintained his sacking in on
November 11, 1975, took him by surprise. Sir John, who died in
1991, said his decision was in response to the Senate supply crisis
that began a month earlier.

In an interview published in today's Good Weekend, Ms
Reid says she informed Mr Whitlam in September 1975 that Sir John
had told her and the artist Clifton Pugh he was going to dismiss
the prime minister. (Pugh, who died in 1990, had been working on
Sir John's portrait.)

Ms Reid had unusual access to Sir John - he pursued her
romantically. She says the widowed head of state became obsessive,
bursting into the house of a Whitlam aide she was visiting one
night, crying: "Where is she?"

At one point he proposed to her, saying: "Why work for the
second-most important man in Australia when you could be married to
the most important?"

Ms Reid declined. Sir John remarried in April 1975.

Mr Whitlam details Sir John's premarital interest in Ms Reid -
his unexpected visits, lunches, dinners, possession of her private
number - in his 1979 book, The Truth of the Matter.

Ms Reid's term as Mr Whitlam's women's adviser came to an abrupt
end in September 1975 after a Women and Politics conference
triggered an avalanche of negative press coverage. Ms Reid was seen
as an added liability for an already beleaguered government.

But it was at the end of a private audience with Mr Whitlam to
tender her resignation that she warned him of Sir John's intention
to sack him.

Her words fell on deaf ears. "It was as if I hadn't spoken," she
said. "It was unthinkable to Gough, who had brought this man in and
was proud of the egalitarian nature of things and just hadn't
realised the whole thing had gone to Kerr's head. As far as [Kerr]
was concerned, he was the Queen of Australia."

There was another reason for his incredulousness, she felt.
"Later, when it all came true, I thought that perhaps if it had
been a man saying it, or someone who had come in with a political
hat on, Whitlam may have at least reflected on it or had one of his
staff check it out," she said.

Mr Whitlam declined to comment, other than to state that his
only recollections of matters relating to Sir John and Ms Reid were
outlined in his book.